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Whitsell
Auditorium,
1219 SW Park Ave., 221-1156. Dear Antonioni, 7 pm
Friday, Dec. 8., 5 pm Sunday, Dec. 10. La Notte,
7 pm Saturday, Dec. 9. Red Desert, 7 pm Sunday, Dec.
10. L'Avventura, 7 pm Thursday, Dec. 14
Antonioni's
L'Avventura drew boos from the Cannes crowd but won
the Grand Jury Prize.
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Imagine if Dorothy's yellow brick road never ended. Suppose
Luke was too depressed to torch the Death Star, or a guardian
angel never made George Bailey's life wonderful. This is Michelangelo
Antonioni's world, and if it feels endless and vacant, that's
the point.
Antonioni is one of those unfortunate filmmakers whose
greatness can send viewers scurrying. Once revered, this
legend has lost luster while fellow innovators have been
deified. Why? Unlike the circus of Fellini or the weighty
inquiry of Bergman, Antonioni's films are exhausting excursions
that deliberately withhold the happy endings, effortless
serendipity and tidy resolutions most viewers expect. Sometimes
it's hard to decide what his films mean at all.
Although Antonioni's career blossomed in the 1950s and
'60s, he was arguably the first modernist filmmaker of the
20th century. Like the novels of Woolf and Joyce, Antonioni's
films distilled the chaos and alienation rendered by world
war and its psychological hangover. Like De Sica and Fellini,
Antonioni spoke a more genuine, if elusive, form of film
language. Critics called this movement Italian Neorealism,
but the point was that life can't always be collected into
neat little packages, and Antonioni was one of the first
filmmakers to figure it out.
This week the Northwest Film Center's brief Antonioni retrospective
offers a perfect chance to revisit this filmmaker through
three of his seminal works, with Gianni Massironi's adoring
documentary Dear Antonioni as a primer.
If you see one Antonioni film, make it L'Avventura.
Its premiere at the 1960 Cannes Film festival drew a chorus
of boos--and then it won the Grand Jury Prize. A group of
young Italian socialites' carefree sailboating trip turns
tragic on a rocky Sicilian island when a member of their
party disappears. The missing woman's fiancé (Gabriel
Ferzetti) and best friend (frequent Antonioni muse Monica
Vitti) search for her endlessly, engaging in an on-again,
off-again affair as their only means of solace. But they
never find her. Antonioni called L'Avventura "a detective
story back to front," and indeed the film--like so much
of his work--creates a mystery instead of solving one. It's
aggravating, but succeeds in evoking the characters' desolation.
Viewing Antonioni's Red Desert is like watching
someone drown in a puddle of water. Set in a rural industrial
landscape of washed-out red and gray tones, the film follows
Giuliana (Vitti), an engineer's wife who, in the wake of
a car accident, is adrift in depression and bewilderment.
Neglected by her husband, she takes refuge with his best
friend (Richard Harris) and ultimately succumbs to an affair.
But no matter whom she seeks or where she goes, Giuliana
can't find a soul who understands her plight--or even cares.
The retrospective also includes La Notte, another
tale of existential gloom and brief sexual escape. But Antonioni's
most popular work, the Swinging London chronicle Blow
Up, is regrettably missing. Perhaps it's fitting, though:
Antonioni would be the first to admit you can't have it
all.
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